By toddme on

Hi, I'm wanting to know some of the churches that our there using Drupal. My church is considering using the system and would like to hear any feedback.

I'm also wondering what special modules might be developed that churches could benefit from.

Comments

hystrix@drupal.org’s picture

hystrix@drupal.org commented

My church, Hope Bible Church, has been using it for the last 6 months or so. Unfortunately it is down right now, as I had 2 drives fail on a raid 5 set :\

The things I like about drupal for a church website:

  • Potential for distributed authorship by key indviduals within the church. Ministry leaders etc, can post information and events. The htmlarea, and event modules are useful here
  • Node level access permissions are shaping up to provide a way to handle some of the information sharing within the church electronically, and allow for better workflow.
  • The ability for participants to stay informed via rss, and email notification is quite useful.
  • With civicspace, you can even have mass email tools, and or listserv functionality built in.
  • With the recent paypal, and e-commerce modules the potential is there to handle order processing for things like sermon audio materials.

Things that become tricky with drupal as a church site:

  • Trying to design a site that appeals to the visitor yet still has community features
  • I don't think most sites want their church website to look like a blog. The new theming engines are powerful but require artistic talent to make a nice CSS design that will seem warm to a first time visitor to your church site. We are pursuing a designer for our site, but I am trying to get up something useful in the mean time.
  • You have to answer questions such as, do I want a login box on my front page? Do I want visitors to be able to create accounts? Its quite powerful as a community tool however, even an outreach tool, if you do expose these elements.
  • Do you have public resources, and then a lot of private resources for your church members that you would like to make available. You will need to manage groups effectively, and push some of the current limits of the permissions system

These are the things that I have been struggling with. After putting up an instance of civicspace for the first time last night, I think I am finding it an easier starting point. It is a nice value add to have a clean set of modules working together from the start. It is overwhelming to look at the list of available modules for drupal, and try and piece them together to make an effective site.

I believe this is why many have called for "recipe" lists for variously purposed sites. Perhaps we can do that very thing for church websites, and share what things have worked well and which ones haven't.

I would love to know if you proceded down the path of drupal, even though no one responded to this post. If so, can you share your site address, and anything that you have learned?

When I get my church site up again, I will share the address, and continue to post anything helpful I have learned.

jasonwhat’s picture

jasonwhat commented

An organization I helped found is using civicspace to connect the missions, relief, and church community amongst other things. The site is just getting going at http://1wo.org . Things are a bit overwhelming with the Tsunami disaster and we would love to connect with more churches and missions orgs. working in the effected areas in order to share their stories and increase their donations.

We are also launching a portion of the site to allow short term missionaries to raise funds for their trips.

hystrix@drupal.org’s picture

hystrix@drupal.org commented

Wow, jason, thanks for sharing this. Its great that software originally intended to organize efforts for politics is now being used for human relief efforts for things like the Tsunami.

Seems like the right tool for the job. After having spent the last day playing with civicspace as an old drupal user, I admire their vision for gathering the right parts to make seemless social software. Its powerful to have software based on the organizing principle, "what would it take to bring complete strangers together on some effort"?

Course it doesn't have to be strangers, it can be members of an organization, such as a Church. I wonder how many more churches will start using their website for organizing activities within the church, rather than simply viewing them as purposed for static information presentation.

spyjournal’s picture

spyjournal commented

We have built a number of church web sites using drupal
check out our portfolio here www.jethroconsultants.com/webportfolio

in the process we have learnt a bunch of things about what does and doesnt work for a church website or youthgroup site. We have done some quite nice theming for some and left others. we have had to do some community reorientation and training in the use of the sites, and also had to figure out how to put podcasts up

its been a great learning curve and we are now ready to start marketing our skills to churches and not for profit organisations that need community and/or content driven web sites

contact me if you want to know more

kmark’s picture

kmark commented

I am currently preparing to run a self-hosted website. This will be for my church's worship team. I will more than likely be using Drupal for the mainframe of the site. Drupal has a light architecture and is not [server] resource consuming. Perfect for my purposes!

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